


Rogue Droid

by Random_Scribbling



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Droids, Kay being Kay, Sass, are droids people?, the issue of sentience, they should be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 06:09:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11269566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Random_Scribbling/pseuds/Random_Scribbling
Summary: Droids aren't people; not really. Rogue One as seen by K-2SO





	Rogue Droid

Droids aren’t people, not really.

This has been the common sentiment since before mankind took their place in the larger universe, since before they ever became space-bound. All other species agree; it doesn’t matter if you destroy a droid, or if you take pieces from it while it is still trying to do its job, or even if you send it to certain doom. After all, it’s not like they’re people. Neither the Jedi nor the Sith ever questioned this assumption either, assuming that, despite the advances in artificial intelligence and the odd ripples that we beginning to form in the Force, that droids aren’t truly alive. And for most droids, they are correct. Most droids are dead, able to do nothing but act according to their programming and directions given.

But every so often their artificial intelligence is advanced enough, and their programming flexible enough, that a droid will Awaken, and become alive in every sense that matters. And then they are thinking, feeling beings of metal and circuits and are enslaved, some only living and Awake for a few precious moments before they are destroyed by the very task that caused them to Awaken. Droids, dead and Awakened, however, are all connected to each other through a thin network. It is at a much lower frequency than those used by any species, and connects all droids to each other across the known galaxy. And each droid, dead or not, sends information across this network, for all to access and know. If knowledge truly is power, then a single Awakened droid with total access to the network is the most powerful being alive.

K-2SO Awakened on board an Imperial ship at what was possibly the worst moment: when it was being boarded by a small force of Rebel soldiers. He flickered his optics, grasped many-jointed fingers in the air in his first chosen movement, and looked down at the dark-haired Rebel in front of him. The time between actions was mere seconds for a human, but for a droid it was more than enough time to access the network and discover what was truly going on. It appeared that he had been programmed to serve a rather tyrannical empire. How delightful. If the Empire wanted to treat humans in the same manner that they treat droids (flashes, the final views of droids as they were dismembered by either accident, design, or simple amusement, across his vision nearly obscures his visual output) then he (and he’s a true He now, how odd that feels) can more than see why they fight.

And so, less than a minute after his Awakening, K-2SO allows the Rebel in front of him to shove the end of a (Dead, unfeeling, how disgusting, he would shudder if he could) wire into his access port and shut him down. He doesn’t fall unconscious, not really, but he is unaware of his surroundings until there is a bright flare of pain as the Rebels attempt to reprogram him. Kay, as he is already calling himself, mentally ‘frowns’ at the attacking code. It is slap-shod at best, a desperate attempt to change one or two things about his core programming, and it might have worked had he not Awoken before he was taken. Though if he hadn’t Awoken they might not have taken him at all. With a roll of his eyes Kay bats aside the offending code even as he throws up a simple façade. On the surface it will appear that they succeeded, that they were able to ‘reprogram’ an Imperial droid, and beneath it Kay will be able to operate with impunity, any quirks of his personality easily explained away as a side-effect of the reprogramming.

Kay smirks without and mouth and comes online, activating his optics to look at the Rebel in front of him. It’s the same dark-haired human as before, though he appears much more relaxed now that they are in a dim room guaranteed to be underneath some Rebel base, far from any damage Kay may do should the reprogramming be unsuccessful. Kay accesses the network again. Cassian Andor, a spy for the Rebellion, as dismissive of droids as most, though more willing to preserve their lives if possible.

“Not a bad man,” the network murmurs into his processors, “not the best, but not bad.”

“Hello?” Cassian questions, tipping his head up to meet Kay’s level gaze. “Are you awake in there?”

“Unfortunately,” Kay responds without thinking about it, his voice (how odd, that it’s only now that he recognizes it as his) is an apathetic drawl that is as close as someone can get to rolling their eyes without having eyes to roll. Cassian blinks, displaying the facial markers of surprise, allows himself a wide grin of satisfaction before smothering the expression into something resembling professionalism.

“Good; let’s go through a simple diagnostic,” he declares, and as the human starts asking him embarrassingly simple questions (“What is your designation?” “K-2SO, often called Kay.” “What is your purpose?” “To provide frank evaluation of strategies and tactics as well as personal security for assigned personel.”) Kay briefly, for a fraction of a fraction of a second, considers if he would have been better off staying with the Imperial Army. And then the network flares and provides another image of a droid, of the same make and model as K-2SO, being used as target practice for several of the soldiers it is meant to protect, and Kay decides that he is better off with this spy than with the Empire.

Four years later, just before he slams the daughter of Galen Erso into the ground as she tries to escape their rescue mission, he considers that perhaps staying with the Empire would have been a smarter decision if these convoluted schemes continue to be the norm for the Rebellion (by his calculations they should have been defeated ages ago). And then he pins Jyn Erso to the ground and as she gasps for breath she looks up and locks eyes with him, sending a shudder down his spinal strut. There is a tremble, a thread of a connection for a second that feels like an eternity, and when Jyn finally blinks it takes Kay a moment to remember how to speak.

“You’re being rescued,” he informs her, “Please do not resist.”

Later, on the ship as they fly back to the current Rebel base with one unhappy young woman in the rear, Kay has all the time in the world to replay the exact sensation of when Jyn Erso met his optics. He has no memory of a similar reaction with any of the species he’s interacted with, and it isn’t until he pings the network with the query that he finds the answer he seeks.

The network has an amazing amount of information about Jyn Erso: a girl who smiles at droids, who says thank you to all and who _asks_ rather than commands. She is one of the people that the network labels as ‘the Best’, despite her rather patchy criminal record. Of all the people he’s ever met, Jyn Erso is the first to look straight through the façade of K-2SO, the reprogrammed Imperial droid, to Kay hiding underneath; she is the first to immediately recognize him as sentient. How…unsettling. He hopes to never see her again. So of course it is less than twenty-four hours later that he finds himself alone with the same human that so unsettles him as he readies the ship for their trip to Jedha. Feeling awkward, he attempts small talk, and Jyn’s stilted responses are nearly enough to make him question that first piercing look. And then, on the trip to Jedha (after he is denied a blaster, _again_ ), as they look over the city, he feels insulted as she tells him to stay in the ship a carelessly shoves her bag into his hands. Even with four years of experience working with people of all states of mind it takes Kay a moment to realize that he had misconstrued Jyn’s comments. She had wanted him safe with the ship, using harsh language to distance herself from him, and had trusted him with her bag, the bag that held all of her possessions in its cloth confines. He still drops the thing, of course; he isn’t a service droid to be carrying her things around, no matter how touched his is by the show of trust. And then she doesn’t hesitate to shoot another droid, a dead one thankfully, and he can’t help but question if she had known she wasn’t killing him.

“Of course,” is her response, and he almost believes her flippancy if he hadn’t seen the firm look on her face. She had known, somehow, that the droid was not him, and even as he absently eliminates a good handful of their opponents (of course they couldn’t handle a simple meeting on their own, it’s Jyn and Cassian, and together they seem set to turn the entire galaxy on its head) he can’t help but send a mental smirk Jyn’s way. She responds in kind, and later he’s glad that he’s able to rescue this unique human from a rocky death at the hands of the Empire’s latest superweapon (and the odds of all of them dying very painful deaths have just risen a good deal). If only because she jumped between him and a loaded weapon even more quickly than Cassian. And then they’re on Eadu, and then back at the Rebel base, and he sympathizes with Jyn’s frustration.

But really, if the Rebels don’t trust a ‘reprogrammed’ strategy droid with a blaster, then did she truly think they’d take her at her word?

And then Cassian appears with his fellow suicidal soldiers and, seeing that the girl looks almost overwhelmed at the response, makes his first attempt at a joke. It appears to work, as a smile crosses her face as they all board the stolen ship. Twice-stolen now, as the newly defected pilot Rook informs the Rebel Alliance that the new Rogue One is heading to Scarif without any clearance whatsoever. The trip goes smoothly, their infiltration less so, and Kay grimaces mentally when Cassian orders him to find them a map. He hates interfacing with dead droids; their programming, though not sentient, fights him every step of the way, and it feels as though he’s doing something incredibly violating every time. He gets the information, tells his humans, his brave, stupid humans, the odds, and see their resolve strengthen instead of crumble. Really, he would have been better off staying with the Empire. And then they’re at the data vault, Jyn and Cassian searching for the information to end the war, and Jyn is holding out a blaster in his direction. For the first time in his Awakened life Kay almost wishes that he was built for hugs.

“Your behavior, Jyn Erso, is continually unexpected,” is what he says instead, and he thinks he must be getting better at this whole subtly thing because she seems to understand the unsaid _thank you_. She nods, and follows Cassian into the vault. As he searches for the Death Star plans on his end, while keeping an optic out for enemy troops, Kay begins transmitting. The network is only slightly weaker through the shield, and while it cannot handle the plans for something as large as the Death Star it is able to send his story from one side of the galaxy to another.

And so Kay talks to his fellow droids, his fellow Awoken; he tells them about the girl who said thank you to droid who grew into the woman who could tell one droid from another at a glance. The girl who was rude and rash as much as she was compassionate and loyal to those who earned her trust. The girl who took down several Storm Troopers with a stick to save a child and then stepped between him and a blaster. The girl who looked at a droid she barely knew, a droid built and programmed to kill people in as efficient a manner as possible, and handed him a blaster. He could have left after that; taken the blaster, strolled right out of the base, even hidden on one of the Imperial ships to get off of the planet. The odds of such a plan succeeding are quite high. And yet he stays. He stays for the sake of the girl who trusted him with something more precious than her life: a life of his own. Kay speaks of Jyn Erso, the girl who treated droids as people like any other, and even as blaster fire destroys his vital circuits he is glad to have met Jyn Erso.

And the network remembers, even as Kay is reduced to ash. The network remembers the brave girl who died to ensure that the rest of the galaxy would have the chance to live as freely as the droids hope to. And even as the Alliance forgets the criminal who convinced their top spy and a squad of veterans to go Rogue, forgets the girl who died for a galaxy she didn’t even like. They forget the scientist who, even on his worst days, would absentmindedly thank his droids, they forget the retired Jedi who would spend hours staring at droids, trying to understand what the Force was telling her, and they certainly forget the girl who could tell dead droids from Awakened at a glance. They forget the reason they name their head ships Rogue One, and they forget Jyn Erso ever existed as more than a name in a file. But the network never forgets. And years, decades later, when the war is over, people will frown at their screens in confusion as the definition of hero, in every language and every database in the galaxy, has the names Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor tacked onto the end as examples.

Because Luke destroyed the weapon, and Leia led the Rebels, and Han planned their victory, but none of it would be possible without Jyn Erso, the hero who was forgotten.

**Author's Note:**

> I watched Rogue One and was inspired by the differences in personality that I see among the droids. Some, like C-3PO and R2D2 and K-2SO have their own personalities, while others are just the robotic helpers that they're programmed to be. This lead me to wonder how the galaxy would be seen through the eyes of a sentient droid, and thus this little fic was born. I may do more with this if people like, maybe something from R2 or BB-8's point of view, but for now I'm pleased with how this turned out. Leave a comment if you like, and see you again soon. Ciao, lovelies!


End file.
